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SICB Officers

Educational Council Report


    John Pilger, Educational Council Chair

    Before I begin with new business, let me say "thank you" to the outgoing chair, Sue Cook. Sue’s dedicated service to the council through difficult circumstances is truly appreciated. Under her leadership the council has sponsored several workshops on educational issues and the Careers in Biology brochure has been reincarnated into a 90’s format.

    As your new chair my first duty was to find four new council members to fill vacancies. Thus, in addition to myself, the members of the Educational Council are Mimi Bres, Jay Labov, Linda Mantel, Wendy Ryan and David Towle. I thank the new and returning members for their willingness to serve and look forward to working with them.

    At the Educational Council business meeting in Boston we hosted several visitors from Project Kaleidoscope (PKAL). Through workshops and seminars, PKAL strives to revitalize undergraduate science education. They do this by helping to improve introductory courses, encouraging a research-rich environment, providing information to help improve science facilities, and by validating curricula through program reviews. Several PKAL faculty for the 21st century who are also SICB members attended our business meeting to discuss ways that we might conjoin our efforts. We agreed to sponsor a workshop at the Denver meeting that would host a plenary speaker and then focus on related educational topics. To avoid conflicts with attendance at professional presentations we intend to meet during the afternoon prior to the beginning of the SICB meeting. Watch for details of this in the SICB Fall newsletter.

    Several years ago the Educational Council produced a brochure titled Careers in Animal Biology. It was directed to high school students who may be considering a career in biology. Under the leadership of SICB president Alan Kohn and Educational Council chair Sue Cook, an effort to update the brochure was initiated. Coordinated and managed by Nina Caris, this brochure is nearing completion. This information will be added to the SICB web page and made available in printed format for those who request it.

    To enrich the Educational Council page of the SICB web site, we would like to include a resource page that would provide live links to educationally-based web resources for educators. Please send me your favorite URLs (maybe even your own page) with a short sentence or two describing the content and academic or pedagogical value of the site. We’ll collate them and get them on our page. My e-mail is: jpilger@ness.AgnesScott.edu.

    In order to understand our constituency and to better meet your pedagogical needs, we intend to send a member survey to all SICB members in the Fall newsletter. We will appreciate your thoughtful responses.

    We wish to encourage oral or poster presentations of education-related topics at the SICB Annual Meetings. Therefore, I want to emphasize the fact that the presentation of an educationally-focused paper will not preclude presentation of a paper on your biological research at the same meeting. Educational papers may be grouped together into a single session, if warranted, or they may be presented as part of the Division of Integrative and Comparative Issues.


The Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology
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